Pinewood Derby Medal

For the last few years, I’ve cut wood slices to make placement medals for the local nature center’s annual Fly with the Flock fun run. This year as I was cutting the wood slices for the fun run, I thought that they would be fun for a Cub Scout Pinewood Derby medal. I volunteer with the local cub scouts, and whipped these up for the boys. I think the boys liked their medals, glitter and all. Although one boy thought the race car looked like a duck, oh well.

These medals are really easy to make and are really cheap. You’ll want to find some branches that have fallen or trimmed from a tree and have dried for some time. It’s best if the wood is very dry. A good size to look for is around 2 1/2″ – 3″ diameter branches. You’ll also need string, glitter, Elmer’s glue and a foam brush.

Wood slices are really easy to cut on a band saw. Trim any protruding branches off of the main branch. Make the wood slices approximately 1/4″-ish thick, and steadily feed the branch into the blade. You don’t need to push to hard, let the blade do the work. If you don’t have a band saw, a miter saw or a table saw will work. If you don’t have a band saw, hopefully you know a nice woodworker who does 🙂

Near the top of each medal, drill a small hole for the necklace string.

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Next you’ll want to create the symbols that you want on the medal face. I found this race car from clip art in Word. The font is Gill Sans Ultra Bold. The possibilities are endless.

Once I came up with a design, I cut out a template with an X-acto knife. I put the template on the wood slice and dabbed Elmer’s glue (the white kind kids use in school) on with a foam brush. Then I removed the template and poured glitter on the face and tapped off the extra glitter. Let the glue and glitter dry. Once dry, I carefully removed the excess glitter with a vacuum hose. I put a light coat of polyurethane on top, thinking that it might hold the glitter in place, but I don’t think it made a difference.

If glitter isn’t your thing, you can always write and draw on the medals with a sharpie. That is what the nature center does with their fun run medals, and they turn out great.

To install the string, I folded a piece of string in half and threaded the fold through the hole. Take the string ends and thread them through the string loop/fold and pull the ends tight, and tie the ends together.

My son was so thrilled with these medals, he can’t wait to be a big cub scout. We made him a special medal. We printed a picture of a race car and used mod podge to glue it onto the wood slice, he loves it.
Happy racing!

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